Marketing, advertising & media intelligence

Michael Fox set up online shoe company ‘Shoes of Prey’ after leaving Google in April 2009. Like many others, he believed he had a compelling business idea: to sell customisable women’s shoes and do it entirely online. And to level out the playing field against all the major retailers, Fox crafted a way of creating huge online buzz.

With some savvy marketing, Shoes of Prey chose a great brand ambassador (hugely popular American tween video blogger, Blair Fowler) to reach the original target audience. He paid Blair to do a video blog all about the product. The resulting video was viewed 450,000 times in a week and was the 5th most popular video worldwide on the day it went live. But not one sale came as a result because the people watching the video were all 13-17 year olds.

Fox learnt the lesson and quickly tweaked its online presence to make it easier for the young girls to share information about Shoes of Prey with their friends and family who had the purchasing power to actually buy the product.

Since adapting the online presence for Shoes of Prey, Fox and his team have seen huge success, including winning the award for ‘Australia’s Most Innovative Online Retailer.’

You can read more about the stats and the story here. But the lessons to take away are that everything you do online must be as sharable as possible and your target audience isn’t necessarily the only demographic you want to be talking to.

Like email marketing, reaching the maximum amount of people on Facebook peaks between 9am and 10am. And, unsurprisingly, 92 percent of re-tweets of Twitter happen within the first hour. However, what is perhaps more noteworthy, is that asking people to ‘please re-tweet’ is highly significant, even if it is a bit cheesy.

To hear more about the importance of timing for your social media activity and how you can achieve genuine ROI, check out www.socialmediajunction.co.nz, where Fox will be speaking.

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23 years ago I did an interactive promotion with James Kwok at Saatchis for Bluebird potato chips on TV2 at 7.30 pm. Two years later I was doing websites for the likes of Sun Direct Insurance and more with Howdo. ...

Congrats on 25 years Simon - since leaving the industry 11 years ago (!) I've looked on at FCB doing some great work. Good luck with the future - I can thoroughly recommend life after advertising. Cheers Brett Atkinson

Simon - You have been a wonderful servant to the industry and in recent years to FCB. I do recall quite some years ago in a short time working together- probably in your first 5 and nearing my 20th - ...

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